Post navigation

The Perfect Health Diet

Before I start this post, I just want to note that I am a bit hesitant to use the word diet. The typical connotation these days is a diet is used to lose weight, or perhaps to gain muscle. But most of the books I have read and post about, diet is more a long term lifestyle change than a short term change.

With that being said, let me also say that I read this book 6-8 weeks ago — I’m still way behind on writing all my “reading notebook” blog posts! But I did take about 30-45 minutes to review all my highlights in the book, to try to freshen it up in my memory a bit. That is always beneficial! 🙂

Of all the Food/Diet/Paleo/Primal books I’ve read in the past year or so, this would be the one I most recommend to anyone asking. Nina Plank’s Real Food would be up there too, though she is more preindustrial than pre-neolithic. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, and with the recent move towards “Paleo 2.0,” where you only use evolutionary biology as a framework, while regarding current science and research and results quite high. I won’t get into all those details here — go read Kurt Harris’s post above!

Of course, there are a couple of things I don’t fully agree with in PHD, which I’ll get to below, but I think this is the best plan overall and perhaps most accesible to both the scientific minded as well as those not quite so technical.

Rather than review the actual content and give a summary of the diet, let me just point you to the web page, which covers the everything in the book and more. In fact, this link gives a high level overview of the recommendations:

Of course, the book goes into much more detail and the science behind the reasoning, and is well worth the read.

There were a couple of things I did not agree with. One such example is that they tend to discard egg whites and just eat the yolks, as “egg whites are almost entirely made of protein; we discard them to keep protein levels down.” But overall, I would certainly recommend this book.